Fallout From the Minnesota Fraud Scandal

Cato Podcast

Cato Institute

News Commentary, Policy, Markets, News, Cato, Peace, Libertarian, Politics, 424708, Government, Immigration, Defense

4.6 • 949 Ratings

🗓️ 15 January 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Cato's David Bier and Chris Edwards discuss the welfare fraud scandals in Minnesota, including the $250 million Feeding Our Future scam, to explain how federal money flowing through state programs creates weak oversight and incentives for abuse. They argue that the structure of federal aid to states, not immigration or individual bad actors, is the core driver of fraud in welfare, housing, and health programs.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello everyone. Welcome to the Cato podcast. I am David Beer, the Director of Immigration Studies and the Sells Foundation Chair and Immigration Policy.
0:16.0	I'm here with my colleague Chris Edwards, who is the Kiltz family chair in fiscal studies at the Cato Institute.
0:25.2	We're going to talk about welfare, fraud, and specifically some of the scandals that have come to light in Minnesota.
0:33.6	Chris has written some helpful summaries of what's going on in Minnesota, and I could get to him to sort of explain the backstory of what's happening in Minnesota, and how does this relate to the welfare state in the United States?
0:50.2	Thanks a lot, David, and welcome to our podcast today. I'm going to spend a few minutes talking
0:56.4	about some of the extraordinary revelations about fraud in Minnesota, which have been
1:01.5	hitting newspaper headlines over the last few months. There has been an extraordinary
1:09.6	revelations in at least half a dozen programs in Minnesota
1:13.9	of enormous amounts of fraud, which went on in some cases for years without any kind of oversight
1:24.0	or crackdown. President Trump is now cracking down on some of the fraud in Minnesota,
1:30.7	and that's, you know, creating additional controversies. But to wind the clock back a little,
1:37.6	the biggest ones of the one of these frauds was called Feeding Our Future.
1:43.9	The under during COVID, the federal government passed
1:48.6	massive additional welfare funding. One of those programs was for setting up feeding sites for
1:55.5	children as a substitute for in-school lunches. And in Minnesota, a whole group of folks under the
2:07.8	leadership of this woman called Amy Bach set up 250 fake feeding sites for children that scam
2:16.2	$250 million from federal taxpayers. They claimed that they had
2:22.4	served 91 million meals to children in Minnesota. It turned out to be virtually all fake.
2:29.7	It took quite a while for this fraud to be discovered within the state.
2:36.4	The state agency eventually did discover it, but then it became sort of trapped within
2:43.3	political back and forth.
2:47.9	Most of the people that were setting up the scam, uh, feeding sites were
	...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in 23 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Cato Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Cato Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.